famous memory, were instituted for the defence of the Holy Land, or for restraining the progress of the infidels, could no longer sustain a falling empire; their power had been broken on the plains of Nicopolis; and they could not aid the feeble Palæologus, when the ancient capital of the world was threatened by an army of Ottomans. But the Turks were checked again in a manner neither thought nor dreamt of by either Greek or Roman. For, in the concluding words of the sixty-fourth chapter, and of the eleventh volume of Gibbon's history, we read, "The sultan claimed the city as his own; and, on the refusal of the emperor John, Constantinople was more closely pressed by the calamities of war and famine. Against such an enemy, prayers and resistance were alike unavailing; and the savage would have devoured his prey, if, IN THE FATAL MOMENT, he had not been overthrown by another savage stronger than himself. By the victory of Timour, or Tamerlane, the fall of Constantinople was delayed about fifty years.” The story of the cage of Bajazet is an everlasting memorial of his captivity; and the fall of Constantinople was indefinitely delayed, and the doubt must have arisen in the mind of every Turk, whether its siege would ever be renewed, AT THE VERY MOMENT when its fall was otherwise inevitable. The period of PREPARATION was not fully accomplished. The civil wars of the sons of Bajazet succeeded the sudden irruption of Tamerlane and his Tartars, who, though with all its fierceness, passed, as he came, like a meteor. In 1421 the Ottoman empire was reunited under Amurath II, who, in the following year, laid siege in vain to Constantinople, with "an army of two hundred thousand Turks." "Their assaults were repelled by the sallies of the Greeks and their foreign mercenaries; the old resources of defence were opposed to the new engines of attack; and the enthusiasm of the dervish who was snatched to heaven in visionary converse with Mahomet, was answered by the credulity of the Christians, who beheld the Virgin Mary, in a violet garment, walking on the rampart and animating their courage. After a siege of two months, Amurath was recalled to Boursa by a domestic revolt, which had been kindled by Greek treachery, and was soon extinguished by the death of a guiltless brother. While he led his janizaries to new conquests in Europe and Asia, the Byzantine empire was indulged in a servile and precarious respite of thirty years.' The exploits of Hunniades and Scanderbeg delayed, to the last, the ruin of the Greek empire. But the time at length approached, and the period of preparation was drawing to a close. The marked era of the solemn "inauguration" of the Turkish sultan by the vicar of Mahomet, to be vicegerent over the Moslem world, could scarcely have escaped the peculiar attention of the least observant reader. By that remarkable event the connexion was established, as to unity of object, between the Saracen and Turkish dominions, "or the first and second woe." And the king of the Turks from that day entered on the execution of his office. Whenever victory attended his arms, he looked to Constantinople as finally the seat of his empire; and whether he was a descendant of Seljuk or of Othman, he never lost sight of the great aim of his race, to plant the crescent above the cross in the city of Constantine. 66 The inauguration" and investiture of the sultan by the caliph, when the sword was literally put in his hand, is, indiscriminately with other events, antecedent as well as subsequent-recorded by Gibbon under the date of A. D. 1055, without the specification of any more precise date till the death of Togrul in 1063. Yet, however unsatisfactory so indefinite a narration may be, it imparts an approximation to the truth. For by the same authority, with all concurrent history, we learn, that on the 9th of February 1451, Mahomet II., the conqueror of Constantinople, *Gibbon, vol. xii. p. 57, c. 65, ascended the throne on the death of his father Amurath II. The sixty-eighth chapter of Gibbon's History begins thus: "The siege of Constantinople by the Turks attracts our attention to the person and character of the great destroyer. In the first summer of his reign, he visited with an army the Asiatic provinces; but after humbling the pride, Mahomet accepted the submission of the Caramanian, that he might not be diverted by the smallest obstacle from the execution of his great design." A subsequent paragraph is titled in the margin, hostile intentions of Mahomet, 1451-as the deliverance of the caliph of Bagdad by the first Turkish king, is in like manner related under the date 1055. In noting the intermediate period, a few figures may supply the place of many words. A. D. 1055 A. D. 1451 But the historian here lags behind the prophet, in accuracy and minute specification of dates. The word of God, in respect to that which was future, is far more precise than that of the fallible narrator of events that are past. And the man who was wont to sneer at the visions of Daniel and the apocalypse, but consumed the midnight oil in unconsciously expounding their meaning, has here to be charged with a want of historical definiteness and precision, and with conjoining paragraphs, periods, and dates, by which means it is, an eloquent history being in fault, and not by any want of definiteness on the part of the prophet, that the prophetical period immediately in our view, has been so long involved in needless obscurity. It is only when he ceases to be minute, and when distinct facts are not pointedly noted by his that the most elaborate and the most celebrated of pen, modern historians ceases to bear admissible and incontrovertible testimony to the divine reality and irrefragable truth of the visions of the exile of Patmos, who bore the testimony of Jesus. Let events run their course, and history do its part, and there is no fear that the Revelation of Jesus Christ will ever be scoffed at, except by the most irrational, as well as the most irreverent, of men. It is not, at least, for those who idolize the historian, to mock the prophet who has overmatched him in accuracy. But we have no quarrel with Gibbon. That which sufficed abundantly for general history, comes not up to the proof that is requisite here. He flags in testimony to the truth of prophecy only where he fails in precision. And though, abandoning his usual habit, which some of his votaries may term evil, he drops for a moment the office of interpreter, yet he leads to the interpretation, and we only need to be guided by his hand to find it. Nor is it far to seek, nor difficult to be found. For on the very page which he has quoted, and to which he refers-Guignes' General History of the Huns, vol. iii. p. 197,*—not only is the exact year (1057) in which the sultan was installed in his high office, expressly stated, but the act of his investiture is described, without being mingled up in the same paragraph with those events to which it was consecutive; and in a note, the very day of the week, of the month, and of the year, are all specified with a minuteness satisfactory to the most scrupulous and rigid inquirer, and therefore enough to form one of the limits of a period, recorded in the word of God, and one of the means of discerning its absolute truth. Any sober-minded interpreter of that word has no need to fear facts, but only to collect them; nor to flinch from dates, but only to investigate them :—the more * See Appendix, where the paragraph referred to is inserted at length. narrowly the better, and the nearer to the truth, even till it be defined, and touched, and handled on every side. The whole period of preparation, as the reader must remember, was three hundred and ninety-six years and one hundred and three days. Commencing in the year 1057, its expiry, within the period of a year, is a matter perfectly plain. A. D. 1057 A. D. 1453 The accurate and learned Guignes, as he is repeatedly termed by Gibbon, who freely translates from his pages, referring to the authority of Bondari and d'Herbelot, states that the date of the entrance of Togrul Beg into Bagdad, and of his installation by the sultan, was the 25th of Dzoulcaada in the year of the Hegira 448. The Hegira, or the flight, commenced on the night between the 15th and 16th of July, A. D. 622, or six hundred and twenty-one years, and one hundred and ninety-six years after the beginning of the Christian era. The Arabic, or Turkish, year is lunar, consisting of 354 days, in a cycle of 30 years, each cycle containing eleven intercalary or additional days. Dzoulcaada is the eleventh month of the Turkish year. And from the commencement of the Hegira to the 25th of that month, A. H. 448 (or the 3d of February 1057) comprehends the period of four hundred and thirty-four years, and two hundred and three days; while the prophetic period of preparation subsequent to the 25th of Dzoulcaada, A. D. 448, fills up the last space from the commencement of the Christian era to the expiry of the time during which the Turks were prepared to kill the third part of men. |
